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  A* art at Wheelhouse Coffee, downtown SeattleSep 29, 2015 11:13 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:If you should find yourself near the bustling intersection of Westlake and Denny in downtown Seattle some time between now and the end of November (UPDATE: turns out the owner had another artist scheduled, so this only runs through October!), you could pop over to Wheelhouse Coffee (the sharp corner building at Westlake and 8th Avenue, specifically: map) and—along with their fancy coffee blends—take in a whole bunch of framed A* art prints (and even take some home if you want to spend the dough). There are a couple right inside the door
 
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a couple more between their huge, eastward-facing windows
 
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(which render the place brilliant of a morning, I'm told, but the dazzled eyes of their brave bartenders will soon be shielded by yet more of the mostly Amazon-fueled new construction going up everywhere in that area—Amazon's Seattle-area 1-hour Amazon Prime shipping center is on the *other* side of the Wheelhouse, for instance (it had been the dealership where I bought my Toyota, but they gladly sold the property for what was probably buckets of money and moved very inconveniently to south Seattle = PP ... but now I feel liberated from going in to let them tell me all the expensive things they want to do to my car, so that's nice), so you'll also get to watch a lot of their bike messengers blazing in and out on local deliveries), and then the rest high up on their wall behind the counter
 
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extremely helpfully hung there by an expert employee wielding a very tall ladder. The vertical nature of the joint contrasts decidedly with my cinematic-format prints, but the staff seemed pleased with the result, and as long as the baristas are happy, my mission is done.
 
In the growing twilight as I left after concluding my exhausting "supervision" of the art hanging, the setting sun created a striking impression on yet *more* of the shiny new buildings all around the place:
 
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That's the view south along Westlake, and the Wheelhouse is the building corner on the right. 2113 Westlake Ave. Seattle, WA 98121, open weekdays 6 am to 7 pm and weekends 8 am to 2 pm, my stuff there for two months (through November (UPDATE: Nope, just October!)), stop by and say hi, they seem like nice folks. (And thanks to my dad for scouting the place out, and the expert framing!)
 
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(Today was the day where I tried something different with the watercolor paint mixing in the daily A* page; it's kind of a subtle difference in the final painting, but it did pretty much just what I was hoping it would do, and I think it will help a lot; I'll likely jabber on about it tomorrow.)
 
 
 
 
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  Maybe no new page Tuesday! (Art show stuff)Sep 29, 2015 12:39 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I am not 100% sure if I'll get a new page done tomorrow, because I have to take down the current A* art show, move it across town (or more specifically, downtown), and put it up at a brand new venue! That will take a pretty good chunk of the day, so I'll just have to see if I can get a whole A* page drawn and painting and scanned and posted around that. Fingers crossed!
 
Whenever I get to it, though, I'm thinking maybe I'll try a different approach than I've been using to the color mixing; after doing tonight's page, I got to flipping back through some of my really early watercolor pages, when I was painting them really light and using Photoshop to crank up their contrast and saturation to a vast degree, and one thing I realized was that in my quest to approach that level of contrast in the actual watercolor paint, so I don't have to resort to extensive manipulation after the fact in Photoshop (I wanted the original artwork to look like the comic looks, for one thing!), I've sort of turned my original two-color system (red, blue) into almost a four-color system (red, blue, dark reddish-purple, dark bluish-purple), which, when I say it like that, definitely seems needlessly complicated! So I'll try a simpler, more organic, and possibly more intense paint mixing scheme on the next page, and we'll see how that goes—very likely there are good reasons for the way I'm doing it now that I've forgotten, and it will be a disaster—or at the very least, a waste of paint : o—but we'll see! The plot calls for an electrifying page anyway, so this could be fun.
 
 
 
 
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  Ink sketch auction ends this weekend!Sep 26, 2015 3:29 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Don't forget, I have a little black and white pen sketch up for auction on eBay—ending just after midnight Saturday night / Sunday morning!
 
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Here's a sketch I sent to a reader as their monthly reward for supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign—and the monthly support I get through that service really does help keep A* going! It is very important, in A* terms! ^_^
 
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Thank you!!
 
 
 
 
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  I can explainSep 25, 2015 1:07 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Ach, so late! The drawing for today's page went really fast, and I was happy with the liveliness and expression that came out of it, even if it was slightly cartoony—but this doesn't seem to fly when it comes to me doing a full-on painting approach, so the painting ended up being a struggle against something that just wouldn't sit right with the face, and eventually, mostly after I'd stopped streaming and went back to it (I think sometimes when I'm streaming I feel reluctant to launch into the radical revisionism that would require me to be running back and forth between my drawing table (where the live webcam lives) and the big mirror on the bathroom, for getting a different view (flipped in the mirror) of the piece to help sort out drawing problems...so I put it off and try to work around whatever the thing that's bugging me is, instead of tackling it head-on), significant portions of it ended up getting redone in what I guess is a more realistic style, but I can't say it was an intentional style choice exactly—it was just the result of a long bout of excessive fussiness. All that white on the left side is white ink! : o And the pinkish purple where the cheek meets the corner of the mouth is a funky white ink/watercolor hybrid; the cheek furrow next to the mouth is actually a furrow in the paper, where I rubbed the top layer of the paper off with my finger; that was pretty much an accident, but it just happened to be an accident in the right spot to accentuate the expression. ^_^ Anyway this is why it's late as I post this, much too late to write a blog article, see.
 
 
 
 
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  Brush pen doodle-a-thon!Sep 23, 2015 10:16 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here are some tiny ink doodles I did with a Pentel Pocket Brush brush pen on Post-it Notes the weekend before last—these are the ones I think were the most successful in the hour-and-a-half doodling session, but if you want to see me drawing most of them and a whole bunch of others, you can see the whole doodle marathon (they were getting a little foggy by the end : o) on YouTube:
 
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  Unseen drawings rescued from the stream!Sep 22, 2015 11:08 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:If didn't catch me drawing the last two pages live on Twitch (or didn't watch them later in my temporary Twitch archive, or when I copied them over to YouTube for permanent storage), you might not recognize these drawings:
 
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Or maybe you do! Because they're the pencil drawings for the past two days' A* pages, before I went all watercolor on them (and then erased the remaining free pencil lines). I was all excited finally being able to get back to drawing Selenis' face after weeks of her being undercover in that all-concealing helmet, and actually managed some pretty decent renditions of her, by my standards. So I was happy with that, but probably got a little overly ambitious when applying watercolor—thinking of multicolored gradient, semi-abstract shading glory—and the final results ended up pretty different from the pencils!
 
For the first few hours afterwards this sort of thing puts me in the Pit of Despair (pull up a chair), and certainly there are certain details I would like to have preserved better (arms and shoulders not least among them!), BUT it is safe to say that if I had been more conservative with the painting (or at least stuck to something more like lighter, monochromatic shading in the tricky spots like the back of the neck and head), I never would have ended up with some of the weird and strange accidents that ended up happening.
 
I keep thinking there's some eureka moment I'll have some day when I realize how to preserve the initial drawing perfectly while also ending up with an independent, dynamic painting, but... Well, there's always the option of going a little lighter on the paint and not erasing the pencils at all, and sometimes I do like the result of that, but other times it just feels like a compromise, something that isn't as strong as paint by itself *could* have been (if done well ; ). I suppose the real solution is to do all these things enough times that I finally learn which approach will yield the best effect for the given piece. Going with light blue shading for the shadowed side in today's painting probably *would* have been a better move than the highly saturated red I started with, which catapulted me into a long battle with multiple layers of white ink and darker paints...but hey, then we wouldn't be having this interesting conversation! : P
 
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Oh yeah and speaking of watching on Twitch, if you are wanting to do that with your Android or Apple mobile device, you'll probably have better success using the Twitch app for that, rather than trying to do it through your mobile's web browser—which can yield very sluggish results! Twitch's app—the one I've used on Android, anyway—is actually pretty good. (And they even put in a remarkably quick fix to a device-specific bug I reported a while back. : ))
 
 
 
 
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  Black and white sketch up for auctionSep 21, 2015 10:47 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Over the weekend I got the urge to do a little black and white, 5"x7" notebook sketch:
 
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Kind of reminded me why black and white is fun. : ) The sketch is up for auction on eBay through Saturday, starting at just $1.99—with free shipping!
 
 
 
 
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  Sketches from me to youSep 19, 2015 2:20 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I drew and mailed to a reader as their monthly reward for supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign:
 
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The contributions I get through Patreon are a huge deal for this little webcomic, so thank you very much for all your support!
 
 
 
 
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  1st woman in space says USSR didn't want 2ndSep 17, 2015 10:54 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:There's an interesting new BBC article about the first woman in space (in 1963, and still the first to do a solo flight), Valentina Tereshkova, who says that, even though the Soviets touted her as a symbol of the sexual equality they claimed existed in the USSR at the time, after her flight "the Soviet authorities thought it was 'too dangerous' to send more female cosmonauts into orbit"; they did not send a woman into space for another 19 years.
 
They've got a Khrushchev quote about her from back in the day that's great vintage cold war stuff: '"The bourgeoisie always claim that women are the weaker sex. Now here you can see a typical Soviet woman who in the eyes of the bourgeoisie is weak," he said. "Look at what she has shown to America's astronauts. She has shown them who is who!"'
 
And she still is!
 
 
 
 
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  Enceladus wobble reveals global oceanSep 16, 2015 11:07 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:According to a new BBC article, seven years of studying the Cassini probe's photos of Saturn's moon Enceladus—like these, maybe
 
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(Images by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute. That last one includes Saturn's largest moon, Titan, looming in the background.)
 
—has told astronomers that the slight wobble they can see in the moon, small though it may be, can only be possible if the moon's core is not connected to its icy crust—that is, if a global ocean under the crust completely separates the surface from the moon's solid center: "If the surface and core were rigidly connected, the core would provide so much dead weight that the wobble would be far smaller than we observe it to be."
 
It has been evident that liquid water exists on Enceladus for a while—at least since Cassini spotted geysers shooting into space from one of the moon's poles—but there was a debate on just how much liquid water there was—possibly it was just a sea beneath the pole. That theory no longer appears to hold enough water!
 
 
 
 
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  John Singer Sargent & Marguerite Sauvage artSep 15, 2015 11:15 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Today I came across a site with a very large collection of watercolor paintings by John Singer Sargent; in the States at least he's primarily known for his monumental oil portraits, I think, but he also did quite a bit of watercolor work, and his later stuff got really impressive; two pages of the collection with some good examples are here and here; I collected some of my favorites over on my tumblr.
 
If you're interested in more contemporary stuff, you might enjoy French illustrator Marguerite Sauvage's (warning: some artistic nudity, behind thumbnails) illustration porfolio; I love her graceful/twitchy lines and fruity colors. This commercial illustration work of hers is a few years old now; in the past few years she's been doing super-hero comic work for Marvel (check out her short story with writer Noelle Stevenson in Thor Annual #1 (2015), for instance (sample)) and DC (Bombshells).
 
 
 
 
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  Space teddySep 14, 2015 10:44 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I sent to a reader a little while ago as their monthly reward for supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign:
 
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Thank you!!
 
 
 
 
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  High-res Pluto flyby photos start arrivingSep 12, 2015 2:04 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, now more than 69 million kilometers beyond Pluto (and 5 billion kilometers from Earth), has shifted from observation to data transmission mode, so we are now starting to receive its first real high-resolution images, for much sharper views than the earlier, compressed preview images we got several months ago at the time of its historic flyby. The plan is to post batches of new images here every Friday; the first batch, though, is in its own page here; this will supply many weeks of fascinating images—according to the BBC, it will take until "late in 2016" for all the Pluto flyby images to get back to Earth.
 
These new images are pretty darn sharp—here's a 350 km-wide shot showing some of the surprisingly awesome variety of surface features found on the dwarf planet, particularly some of the darker, less reflective areas (all images by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute):
 
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Some of those areas almost look like dunes—but how Pluto's atmosphere, 10,000 times thinner than Earth's, could generate winds powerful enough to create dunes even in Pluto's low gravity is quite a puzzler; there may be some other explanation for what those are.
 
The new images include a good view of Pluto's largest moon, the full 1,200 km diameter of Charon:
 
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Charon is no slouch when it comes to variety of surface features, either! The darker area toward the top is its north polar region.
 
Then there's the neat effect New Horizons observed after it had passed Pluto, looking back at its dark side: the distant Sun shining through the dwarf planet's light atmospheric haze produces a lovely halo effect:
 
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I dipped back into the older, lower-resolution images just to be able to show something of what Pluto's small moons Nix (~42 km, lengthwise)
 
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and Hydra (~55 km long)
 
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look like; we should be getting sharper views of them in later image transmissions.
 
We'll no doubt get a sharper version of this, too, but it's such a darling image I couldn't wait: a view of Pluto and Charon from five days before the July 14th flyby, when New Horizons was still 6.3 million km away:
 
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So cute! ^_^
 
 
 
 
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  Darn that clockSep 10, 2015 10:37 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Oops, it's late! Off to bed, then! : p
 
 
 
 
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  And carry a big staffSep 09, 2015 4:40 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I mailed to a reader a while back as their monthly reward for supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign! ^_^
 
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The folks supporting A* through Patreon really do help keep the comic going, thank you very much!!
 
 
 
 
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  Galactic core, skinsuits looking good on ISSSep 08, 2015 9:11 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Tired of having muscle and bone loss, and even back problems after a stay in microgravity aboard the International Space Station, where expansion of the spine in station's near-weightless conditions has been known to add up to 7 cm / 2.7 inches to an astronaut's height—until they get back to Earth and are four times as likely to get a slipped disc as us non-astronauts? Well, worry no longer! Maybe. Because the European Space Agency thinks they may have the answer in their skin-tight, electric blue prototype spandex skinsuit, a form-fitting body suit that compresses the body (except for the arms, head, and neck, which it leaves bare) in an approximation of Earth's gravity, hopefully counteracting the detrimental effects of floating at your ease in orbit. Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen is giving the skinsuit its first actual space trial on the ISS this week. (As an added bonus, as something of a full-body corset, it probably makes everybody look amazing! : o)
 
Meanwhile, Andreas' station-mate, American astronaut Scott Kelly, needing some way to look amazing *without* a skinsuit of his own, tweeted a pretty fantastic photo of the view toward the center of our galaxy from the ISS. A*'s hiding right there in the middle!
 
 
 
 
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  Calling all forward-thinking CEOsSep 07, 2015 9:20 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Say, do you represent a giant, evil corporation? Would you like to represent a *supermassive* evil corporation? That's right, for just conglomerate pocket change (deals start in the low six figures!), you can join the ranks of such nefarious—and profitable!—legends as Core Sys Corp and the Treban Corporation by having *your* company's name show up to menace Selenis in a future episode of A*! Be the first business in your sector to get your tentacles into the galactic core! Hurry, spots are limited!
 
 
 
 
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  I always seem to be sketching doorway thingsSep 05, 2015 1:00 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Yes it's another monthly reward sketch I mailed out some time ago to a reader for supporting the comic through A*'s Patreon campaign!
 
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Huzzah! Also, those folks supporting A* at e-book reward levels through Patreon will be getting download links for the fresh new episode 26 e-book e-mailed to them this weekend! Unless my internet goes out or something. But it'll probably be just peachy! ^_^
 
 
 
 
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  ...while operating heavy machinerySep 03, 2015 9:14 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here's another monthly reward sketch I mailed off to a reader some time back for supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign : ) (yes I have quite a backlog of these to show!):
 
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Thank youuuuuu!
 
 
 
 
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  Stylish AND practical!Sep 02, 2015 8:33 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Patreon is a service that makes it easy to keep your favorite creators doing what they do by automatically sending them a little money each month. When people do that for me, I like to send them stuff in return! So here's a monthly reward sketch I mailed to a pair of supporters some time back for their generous support through A*'s Patreon campaign:
 
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Thank you! = )
 
Hm. Scarves are fun. We should have more scarves.
 
 
 
 
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  I don't know about these spidersSep 01, 2015 11:14 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:This was the spider web outside my kitchen window this morning:
 
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This spider has been having a rough time of it out there, especially with the pretty good rain and wind storm we had over the weekend. Even on a relatively calm day like today it might end up having to rebuild its web several times over the course of the day. This morning, I found it had redone the center of its web after morning rain, so the raindrops only cover the older, outer part. Kind of a pearl necklace! Cool beans, spider.
 
(Okay I wasn't gonna but while I'm talking about spiders I might as well. At the gym, there was this daddy longlegs (aka cellar spider, apparently—the ones with tiny bodies and super-long, super-thin legs, each several inches long but thin as thread) who'd moved into the corner where I usually stretch out, right under the low, sloping ceiling. That was okay as far as I was concerned because it was several feet above my head level and not right above me. Then, some days later, a *second* one showed up. This one had a slightly rounder, darker body; I kind of assumed it was male and the first was then female, but actually I have no idea. Anyway, "he" was there a couple days, kind of hanging around the other one, trying to creep up on "her" once in a while, which she was in no mood for; she would wave a leg or something at him and he'd beat a little retreat.
 
Then one day, as I was like right there looking up at them, he tried to make a move, got caught, tried to bail, and fell RIGHT AT ME. I jumped back, looked hastily around for him at floor level, and spotted him already scurrying back up the wall. But he only went about a third of the way up, where he hid under an old pipe. I thought he'd be back up at the ceiling by the next day, but he wasn't; never saw him again.
 
A few days later, the remaining spider, solo again, moved down to a lower ledge on the wall, about a foot down—and now maybe just a foot above head level. This initially caused me some misgivings while trying to go through my little pre-cardio-room stretching routine, but the spider seemed okay with me pretending to hold the wall below "her" up for a little while each day, and watching her slowly circle her legs around gave me something to do while stretching, so that was all right.
 
But after another day or so, I'm there stretching, and all of a sudden she wades across her invisible web drapery under the ledge until she's perpendicular to me, a half-foot or so above my eye level, and then she sort of pumps her body up and down rapidly—but sort of smoothly, not jerkily. I thought maybe she was trying to scare me off so I wouldn't be waving my arms around so close to her web. But I was determined not to be scared off. "No spider's gonna push *me* around," I said to myself. She went back to her usual roost off to the side, and I finished stretching more or less as normal, keeping a brave face on things.
 
But now I wasn't sure when she might dash out and pulsate at me again, and for some reason that worried me. I found myself stretching out off to the side once in a while. Then, maybe a day or so after the first time, she ran out and did the pumping motion right above me again—but way less rapidly this time, and for a shorter time, so it really didn't seem threatening. Was she...trying to make friends?
 
This actually worried me more. I wasn't sure how I felt about this. I went to stretching out off to the side more and more. And I got to wondering, in my now non-spider-watching spare stretching time, how long the spider would be there. I never saw evidence of her having caught any bugs in her web—there really weren't many bugs flying through the spot she'd chosen, or even that entire room. Wasn't she getting hungry?
 
THEN the thing happened that's the reason why I'm bothering to tell this really long story. I'd gotten complacent and gone back to my usual spot beside where the spider hung out in the nook above. I'm there stretching my calf or whatever, leaning forward with my two hands braced against the wall, and I look up to see her moving along her web to a point directly in front of me, only again like a half-foot above (the ledge sloping down from her starting point a bit). I remove one hand—the one she's closer to being directly over—from the wall, but otherwise stay there, watching, my face maybe a foot or foot and a half from the wall, looking up. Is she gonna to that pulsing thing? Am I being shooed off again?
 
Well, she doesn't do that. She lowers herself on a new web line, slowly, until she's DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF MY EYES. She dangles there, motionless except for the play of the line causing her to revolve slightly. I probably forget to breathe. THE SPIDER PURPOSEFULLY SUSPENDED ITSELF DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF MY FACE. Seconds pass. The spider slowly climbs back up the line, back along the web, back to rest at her usual spot slightly off to the side.
 
I am definitely weirded out. Vague memories from the book "Charlotte's Web" trot uncertainly through my brain. I don't know what to do. I can't keep this up. I figure out how to do all my stretching way off to the side, around the corner of a semi-pillar where the spider can't see me. I peek cautiously around once or twice a day to see if the spider is still there. "She" is, for days and days, until one day she's back up at the higher spot, right under the low ceiling. A few days later, after the big rain/wind storm, the spider is gone.
 
Okay, I'm probably done talking about spiders for a while. o: )
 
 
 
 
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